From Churchill's Prediction to Post's Burger: A Timeline
What it is
The idea of growing meat without slaughter is not new. What is new is the biological and engineering knowledge to actually do it. The history of cultivated meat stretches from a prescient essay written by a British statesman in 1931 to a regulatory approval in Singapore in 2020 — a span of nearly ninety years during which the concept moved from speculative futurism to commercial product. The intermediate decades were largely invisible: the science was not yet ready, and the concept had no serious advocates or funding. The modern era of cultivated meat effectively begins in the late 1990s and becomes a true industry in the 2010s.
---
1931: Churchill's Vision
In 1931, Winston Churchill published an essay titled Fifty Years Hence in Strand Magazine, later reprinted widely, in which he surveyed the likely technological landscape of the early 1980s. Among his predictions was one that reads as almost exact foresight of cultivated meat:
"We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."
Churchill was thinking in terms of efficiency — the waste of producing an entire organism in order to eat only part of it. He was not an animal welfare visionary (this was, after all, a man who hunted and ate with enthusiasm). But his framing captured something essential: that the conventional relationship between the whole animal and the consumed portion is, from a resource efficiency standpoint, deeply irrational. He did not foresee the specific biological mechanism that would make this possible — stem cell science was decades away — but he identified the logical destination.
The essay was not a scientific proposal. It was a journalist's (and statesman's) speculative projection. It is cited today primarily as evidence of how long the concept has been imaginable, and as a rhetorically useful origin point for an industry that needs to establish intellectual legitimacy.
---
1999: The First Patent
The first serious intellectual property claim in what would become cultivated meat was filed in 1999 by Jon F. Vein, a New York–based inventor, for a process of producing tissue-engineered meat for human consumption. The patent (US Patent 6,835,390, granted in 2004) described a method of culturing skeletal muscle cells on a scaffold to produce edible meat products. Vein was working from the emerging field of tissue engineering, which had developed in the 1980s and 1990s primarily for medical applications — growing skin for burn treatment, cartilage for joint repair.
The application of tissue engineering to food was at that point entirely theoretical. Vein had no laboratory demonstrations, no funding, and no commercial pathway. His contribution was the intellectual property claim, which would later become important as the industry developed and questions of licensing emerged. The patent lapsed and is now expired, which has been fortunate for the industry; had it been maintained and enforced, it could have created significant licensing barriers.
Also in 1999, the Tissue Culture and Art Project — an Australian arts collective — began what they described as the first actual cultivation of animal tissue for consumption, growing frog skeletal muscle cells for an art performance called "Disembodied Cuisine." This project, presented at the L'art Biotech exhibition in Nantes in 2003, is sometimes cited as the first actual tasting of cultivated meat, though the quantities involved were tiny and the context was explicitly artistic rather than commercial. The project was more important as a cultural provocation than as a technical breakthrough.
---
2004–2008: The NASA Connection and Early Research
The space agency NASA funded early research into tissue-cultured meat in the early 2000s as part of investigations into food production for long-duration space missions. In 2002, NASA researchers Morris Benjaminson and colleagues published a paper in Acta Astronautica describing the successful culture of goldfish skeletal muscle tissue — the cells survived and grew in culture, and the researchers noted (controversially, as the paper generated significant press coverage) that they had fried and found the cultured tissue acceptable in appearance, though they did not eat it themselves for regulatory reasons.
The NASA connection is significant not because it produced commercial breakthroughs, but because it established that growing animal muscle cells for food was a legitimate scientific research question rather than pure speculation. It also generated early public attention to the concept.
In 2004, the nonprofit organization New Harvest was founded by Jason Matheny (later director of the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) explicitly to promote and fund research into cultured meat and other animal product alternatives. New Harvest became the first organization to systematically advocate for cultivated meat as a field and to fund academic research into the core technical problems. Matheny co-authored a 2005 paper in Tissue Engineering that is often cited as the first peer-reviewed scientific paper to seriously analyze the feasibility of in vitro meat production for food. The paper identified the key technical barriers and argued for the plausibility of the technology. It provided an academic foundation for a concept that was still largely dismissed as science fiction.
---
2013: The Post Burger — The Moment Everything Changed
The pivotal event in the history of cultivated meat is dated precisely: August 5, 2013, in London, at a studio on Victoria Street. Mark Post, a Dutch vascular biologist and professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, presented the world's first cultivated beef hamburger for a public tasting.
The burger was cooked by chef Richard McGeown and tasted by food critic Hanni Rützler and journalist Josh Schonwald before a gathered audience of journalists, scientists, and investors. Rützler described it as "close to meat" but lacking in fat flavor — the burger was pure muscle tissue, without the intramuscular fat that contributes much of conventional beef's flavor. "It's not juicy," she said. "The consistency is perfect, but it's not as juicy." Schonwald noted a familiar, if thin, meat quality.
The burger had taken Post's team approximately two years to produce. It weighed 142 grams and cost approximately $330,000 to produce, a figure that included the labor of a small team over an extended period. The cost was a feature as much as a bug — it demonstrated the technology existed at the frontier of possibility while signaling the vast distance to commercial viability.
The funding for the burger came from Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, who provided the approximately $330,000 required to produce it. Brin, who has been involved with the open-sea aquaculture company Ocean Health among other ventures, was motivated primarily by animal welfare concerns. He made a video statement for the event describing his motivation: he found the conventional meat industry's treatment of animals troubling and saw cultivated meat as a potential solution.
The media reaction was enormous. The burger was covered by virtually every major news organization globally, typically with a mix of fascination and skepticism. Headlines ranged from the enthusiastic to the satirical. The phrase "lab-grown meat" became firmly established in public discourse. The event was successful at its primary purpose: demonstrating that cultivated meat was real, not theoretical, and placing it firmly on the public agenda.
Post went on to co-found Mosa Meat in 2016, a Dutch startup focused on commercializing cultivated beef. Mosa Meat has continued to develop improved production processes and has been among the more scientifically transparent companies in the space.
---
2015–2020: The Startup Era
The Post burger attracted venture capital attention and spawned a wave of startups in the mid-2010s. Several companies emerged that would become the defining players of the cultivated meat industry's first generation:
UPSIDE Foods (originally named Memphis Meats, rebranded 2021) was founded in 2015 by Uma Valeti, a cardiologist, and Nicholas Genovese, a stem cell biologist, in San Francisco. The company focused initially on beef and later shifted emphasis to chicken. In 2017, it produced the first cultivated meatball and the first cultivated chicken and duck strips — significant product milestones. UPSIDE Foods became the best-funded cultivated meat company in the United States, raising over $600 million through the early 2020s from investors including Tyson Foods, Cargill, SoftBank, and the Bill Gates–affiliated Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
GOOD Meat is the cultivated meat division of Eat Just, Inc. (the company behind the JUST Egg liquid egg product). GOOD Meat's cultivated chicken was the first cultivated meat product to receive commercial regulatory approval and be sold to consumers — in Singapore in December 2020, a landmark discussed further below. The company's founder Josh Tetrick has been one of the most prominent public advocates for the category.
Aleph Farms, an Israeli startup founded in 2017, has focused explicitly on the harder technical problem of whole-muscle cuts — steaks rather than ground meat. The company has produced thin whole-muscle beef prototypes and has pursued a vision of "steak as a service" that positions it at the premium end of the market. Aleph Farms conducted what was described as the first cultivated meat experiment in space, growing small quantities of cells aboard the International Space Station in 2019 in collaboration with 3D bioprinting company 3D Bioprinting Solutions.
Mosa Meat, co-founded by Mark Post, has continued to operate from the Netherlands and published detailed peer-reviewed research on its production processes, including an important 2020 paper on serum-free media formulation.
Wildtype, founded in San Francisco in 2016, has focused specifically on cultivated seafood — particularly salmon. The company is addressing different technical challenges than mammalian meat producers: fish cells grow at lower temperatures (around 15–18°C rather than 37°C), which has implications for energy efficiency; the fatty acid profiles of fish (high in omega-3s) are nutritionally distinctive and must be maintained; and salmon's characteristic pink color and flake texture present specific scaffolding challenges. Wildtype has produced sushi-grade cultivated salmon for tasting events and has positioned its product as a response to concerns about wild-catch fishery sustainability and farmed salmon's environmental impacts.
Other notable entrants include BlueNalu (cultivated seafood, US), Avant Meats (cultivated fish, Hong Kong), Huiwei Kangyuan (cultivated pork, China — one of several Chinese companies that entered the space in the early 2020s), and Vow (Australian startup producing cultivated meat from unusual species, including kangaroo and mammoth — the latter as a publicity stunt involving DNA from the extinct species).
The funding environment for cultivated meat was extraordinarily favorable in the early 2020s. Total investment in the category exceeded $1 billion by 2021. The involvement of conventional meat companies — Tyson and Cargill investing in UPSIDE Foods, JBS (the world's largest meat company) acquiring a stake in BioTech Foods — was notable as a signal of the incumbent industry's hedging behavior.
---
2020: Singapore — The First Regulatory Approval
The first country to grant regulatory approval for cultivated meat for commercial sale was not the United States or a European nation. It was Singapore.
In December 2020, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) approved GOOD Meat's cultivated chicken for sale in Singapore — the first such approval in the world. The product debuted at the restaurant 1880 in Singapore, where it was served as part of a dish by chef Kirk Westaway. A small number of members of the public were invited to taste it in what was effectively a controlled commercial launch.
Singapore's position as the first approver reflects several factors. The city-state imports approximately 90% of its food and has made food security a long-term strategic priority, expressed in its "30 by 30" initiative aiming to produce 30% of its nutritional needs domestically by 2030. Cultivated meat offers a food production method that requires relatively little land and can operate in vertical industrial facilities, which aligns with Singapore's land constraints. The Singapore Food Agency had developed a regulatory framework for novel foods (published in 2019) that provided a clear pathway for cultivated meat that was absent in most other jurisdictions.
The Singapore approval was commercially significant primarily as proof of concept — the quantities produced were small and the prices high — but its symbolic importance was enormous. Cultivated meat had moved from laboratory to legal commercial product in at least one jurisdiction.
---
2022–2023: The US Framework and Approvals
The United States regulatory framework for cultivated meat emerged through a joint FDA/USDA process that was formally announced in 2019 and clarified through subsequent years. The division of responsibility was determined to be: the FDA would oversee the cell collection, cell banking, cell growth, and cell differentiation stages of production; the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) would oversee the harvest stage and food processing and labeling, the same oversight it provides for conventional meat.
This joint framework was codified in March 2022 through a formal agreement between the two agencies. It represented a resolution of earlier uncertainty about which agency had primary jurisdiction — a question with significant practical implications for companies navigating the approval process.
In June 2023, both UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat received USDA "Grants of Inspection" — the final regulatory clearance required to sell their cultivated chicken products in the United States. This followed earlier FDA "no-questions" letters (UPSIDE Foods in November 2022, GOOD Meat in March 2023) indicating that the FDA had reviewed the companies' safety data and found their products safe for human consumption.
The USDA grants were followed quickly by commercial debuts: GOOD Meat's cultivated chicken was served at José Andrés's restaurant China Chilcano in Washington, D.C., and Bar Crenn in San Francisco — a restaurant operated by Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn, who notably closed her kitchen to conventional meat in 2018 on ethical grounds. The debut at Bar Crenn was thus symbolically resonant: cultivated meat served at a restaurant that had refused to serve conventional meat. UPSIDE Foods also debuted at Bar Crenn in June 2023.
The US approvals drew significant media coverage and were broadly framed as a milestone. They were also quickly followed by political backlash (addressed in the cultural reception section below).
---